第12章 Doctor Sandoz Explains

Elke Sandoz found her in the common room the next morning, which was against the rules, and sat down across from her with two cups of tea, which was more against the rules, and pushed one across the table. Sandoz was the only person in the building who looked at Cleo directly. She was somewhere near forty, with a lab coat that had a pen in the pocket and a coffee ring on the sleeve, and the frayed competence of someone who had spent a decade keeping a difficult study running while other people took the credit. She said, without preamble, that she had read Cleo's R-9 through R-17 and that something was clearly happening, and that she wanted to explain it honestly, because the alternative was Cleo building a theory out of the annex and the corridors, and a theory built in corridors is always worse than the truth. Then she explained. Sleep deprivation, Sandoz said, does not make a person hallucinate so much as it makes her *fill in*. The brain under load will accept a supplied detail as a remembered one, and it will do this so smoothly that the person never catches it, and the effect is stronger in a room with no clock, no window, and a speaker, which is why the berths had no clock and no window — not to disorient, but because a clock is itself a memory aid, and the protocol required the participant's own sense of elapsed time to be the measure. Sandoz said that the annex Cleo had read was real, that the study was real, and that it was ugly, and that the memory-transfer line was one arm of it and that it was the arm the funder paid for, and that the science under it was not a conspiracy and not a fiction; it was a documented effect that armies and insurers and courts had wanted for as long as they had wanted witnesses. What Sandoz said next was the careful part. She said the phenomenon Cleo was experiencing was expected, and that it was *hers*, and that the protocol was not taking her memories, and that the feeling of having been operated on was itself one of the symptoms of the effect, the way a fever is a symptom and not a cause. She said that the red door and the man in the coat and the room with the crack in the plaster were almost certainly Cleo's own, and that they had been *primed* into clearer resolution by the bank, the way a photograph is not created by a developer but is made visible by one, and that there was a real difference between a memory that has been sharpened and a memory that has been planted, and that the difference was the whole ethical question of the study, and that she, Sandoz, had spent four years arguing about that difference in rooms with men in suits and had never once been sure she had won the argument. She said that Cleo could withdraw and she would personally process it. She said she would reassign Cleo to berth five, which was empty and had no shared wall with anyone, if quiet was what she needed. She said she would bring Cleo the raw cuff data every morning herself. Cleo sat with the tea going cold and felt the shape of her own suspicion loosen, and it was a relief, and the relief was its own kind of danger, and she noticed the danger and drank the tea anyway. The raw data came the next morning, as promised, on a single printed sheet, and Cleo read it at the table with her tea going cold, because Sandoz had given it to her in front of Corbell and had said, in the steady voice of a person doing the correct thing in public, that a participant should have her own record and that she would bring one every morning from now on. The sheet was a night of cuff trace, one line to a minute, and it showed what she had always suspected a cuff trace would show, which was almost nothing: long flat stretches of sleep, the small mountains of movement at each check, one peak at 03:12 on the night of Nita's calls, and a single unbroken plateau where the trace had no value at all, headed with a code she did not know. She asked Sandoz what the code meant. Sandoz said the cuff had been off for maintenance. Cleo asked when the cuff had been off for maintenance. Sandoz looked at the sheet and said it had been off on the night of the red door, which was the only night in the entire study from which Cleo had no continuous biometric record at all, and she said it the way she said everything, as a fact about equipment, and then she said that the maintenance had been scheduled and that the study logged it, and that Cleo could see the log if she wanted, and Cleo understood that she was being told the truth and was also being told exactly as much of it as would keep her from asking again. Then Sandoz explained the difference between priming and planting, and she explained it well, because Sandoz was good at her work and had spent four years becoming good at her work. She said that a planted memory is one the person never had and can therefore be found out, because the person has no physical residue for it, no body memory, no reflex; a person who has been planted with a fall from a horse will flinch wrongly when the subject comes up. A primed memory is one the person had all along, in fragments, and that the protocol has allowed her to assemble, the way a person who has seen a house in pieces for years can finally be helped to see the whole of it at once. She said the red door was almost certainly a real fragment of Cleo's own, because it had survived twenty-two nights of rehearsal without collapsing, and that the collapsing was the test, and that the door had not collapsed, and that the study did not consider Cleo a failure. Cleo asked whether Sandoz had been in the room on the night of the red door. Sandoz said she had not, and that she had been at her sister's, and that she had a text message from that night that proved it, and she took out her telephone and showed Cleo the message, which was a photograph of a cake, and Cleo looked at the cake and at the timestamps and at Sandoz's face, and filed the whole of it, and said nothing. She asked, because there was one question that could be tested cheaply, who was on the waiting list for berth five. Sandoz drank her tea and said the name was Brunk, and that the participant was in intake and would arrive at the weekend, and that she was a returning participant, and that she was the reason the study was running a fourth week on the fifth berth, because the funder had asked for a fifth body in cohort C and the fifth body had to be somebody who could carry. Then she looked at Cleo across the cups and said the sentence that Cleo would spend the rest of the study trying to fit, and Cleo only later understood that its wrongness was not in the verb. "You were always the steady one in this cohort," Sandoz said. "It's why we kept you." Cleo stopped with her hand on the door. "Kept me," she said. Sandoz looked up from the cups, and for a fraction of a second there was something in her face that had not been there before, the tiny internal correction of a person who has used the wrong tense and heard herself use it. "Chose you," she said. "I meant chose." ---